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Stephen Cunningham took the plunge in 1998. He entered the online registry race, launching WeddingNetwork.com. The Denver-based site planned to take a percentage of sales from its 100 retail partners pitching wedding products and services. But when Cunningham discovered that brides weren't signing up for the thousands of products as much as they were seeking wedding advice, he knew he had to reinvent his business.

There's a $50-billion-a-year industry built around brides. The average cost of a wedding is $25,000. So Cunningham got smart and gave these brides what they wanted: personalized services. To make it happen, Cunningham and his staff had to collect and manipulate a lot of data quickly. "Early on, I was grabbing bits of information and throwing it into an Excel spreadsheet," says Marc Wheeler, WeddingNetwork.com's vice president of marketing and strategies.

In 1999, Cunningham hired veteran data miner Carole Couture as his chief operating officer. Couture had helped Sur La Table, WeddingNetwork.com's kitchenware retail partner, expand its operation and launch its Internet presence. When Couture and her staff started analyzing the information provided by visitors to the site, they discovered a rich customer database containing details on half a million brides and grooms.

"I felt like I'd found oil in my backyard," says Cunningham. But it needed refining. "The data was writing to the database, but there was no relationship," recalls Couture.

No Easy Route to the Altar

What WeddingNetwork.com needed was a business intelligence system that would let it quickly capture customer data, download the data to desktops, and perform analyses. The company built its new data warehouse on Oracle8i and chose Cognos Business Intelligence to access the data. Using the Cognos tool, the dot-com soon discovered that every wedding in its database is basically a 270- to 300-day operation, and it could confirm when each step takes place along the way.

In response to a bride's early search for a dress and a wedding location, WeddingNetwork.com offers live chats with wedding consultants. And when a couple is thinking about transportation, the site sends an e-mail promoting Limos.com. Later, when flowers, a photographer, and catering are on a couple's agenda, WeddingNetwork.com sends a list of local resources.

They've Only Just Begun

"WeddingNetwork.com is way ahead of most companies," says data-mining consultant Gordon Linoff, author of Mastering Data Mining (John Wiley & Sons). "By bringing together disparate pieces, they have started to understand each customer's needs within each stage of the wedding process, and are responding in an efficient and timely waythus fulfilling the dream of e-commerce."

The Cognos Impromptu front end lets WeddingNetwork.com staff create reports for retail partners showing what products are being registered, which ones are purchased, and how long typically passes between registration and sale.

Sur La Table's Seattle store hopes to receive a detailed breakdown of the items sold by vendor, SKU, and so forth. "We want to look at the data from a million different aspects so that we have a heads-up on in-demand merchandise," says the store's information technology vice president, Jaren Balzer.

WeddingNetwork.com continues to widen its reach. By offering an elegant online solution to non-Web-savvy companies, it has picked up new partners and new sources of brides. This past summer, May Department Stores Co. selected WeddingNetwork.com to act as the back end to its online bridal registry for all seven divisions, including Filene's.

Visitors to May sites are actually using WeddingNetwork.com's private-label tools, including a Task Planner and Budgeter. May pays WeddingNetwork.com a fee for transactional activity reports (sent via a nightly database upload). This helps the retailer learn more about its customers, and May passes the information along to its in-store bridal consulting services. WeddingNetwork.com adds the data to its warehouse.

"Essentially we're offering retail partners a targeted list of customers who are at a time in their lives that marks the beginning of adult consumer family buying patterns," notes Cunningham. Home Depot and Pier One have also expressed an interest in signing on as partners.

Modern Bride magazine and ModernBride.com have been so happy with their three-year online partnership with WeddingNetwork.com that their parent company, Primedia, recently took a 60 percent interest, and efforts are under way to integrate the two sites.

Cunningham says WeddingNetwork.com has just begun to plumb the depths of its data. He envisions giving Dom Perignon, for example, the ability to target special offers at couples who match the demographics of a good Dom Perignon customer.

A break on Dom Perignon? That really could mean a lifelong commitment, at least to the champagne.

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